What is the Church’s position on how old the world is? 

Sincerely,

Juan De Izzenov

The world is certainly older than I am, which means that it is very old indeed.

James Ussher, the Anglican Archbishop of Dublin, Ireland around 1630, decided after much calculation and comparison of Biblical texts, (who begat whom and when, etc.) that the world was created on the evening of October 23rd, 4004 BC which according to the current Gregorian calendar would be September 21st 4004 BC. You are free to celebrate either date.

We Catholics, (whom he thought it a grievous sin even to tolerate) are not quite as specific on the date.

You see, we believe that the Bible isn't a book. It is a library with books containing history, law, poetry, parable, allegory, letters and much more. It is easy to get the poetry confused with the prophecy with the history and come up with a specific date for the beginning of the world or for that matter the end of the world. 

The followers of William Miller were quite convinced that the world would end Oct. 23rd 1844, one day after its supposed birthday. They sold their possessions and waited on hills and mountains. When nothing happened, Rev. Miller realized he had made a few errors in his calculations and postponed the coming of the Lord to 1845. When nothing happened once again, Rev. Miller decided that the process of judgment had indeed begun in 1844, but would take a while, what with all the accounts to be checked and so on and that is how the Seventh Day Adventists began. Vegetarians. Lovely people. Good hospitals.

In my youth the Left Behind series was immensely popular and still is. Though its authors never gave a specific date for Armageddon, they certainly had an exact scenario. Others were eager to fill in the date. For sure, the "rapture" was going to happen sometime in 1978, then again in ‘86, then certainly in the year 2000.

It’s gotten so that every time someone tells me his brother-in-law has a pastor who knows a prophet who’s never wrong who says the end is going to come soon, I always ask for the specific date hoping that I won’t have to pay my credit card bill.  Well, so far I have had to keep up on all my bills.

I once reminded one such that Jesus had said no man knows the day nor the hour. He countered that "Yes, but we could still know the month." Good grief, but some people are thick.

It is amazing to me that we Americans are so in love with apocalyptic prophecies that we now regularly predict the end of the world without reference to God. The new national secular religion fixes dates for the end of the world by asteroid, ecological disaster or nuclear war with almost as much precision as the old street evangelists used to predict the coming of the Lord. We are as terrorized by the new national religion of secularist materialism as we were by the old. Amazing! And all without benefit of habited nuns and Marian apparitions!

Catholics have always believed, at least since around about 155 AD, according to people like St. Justin, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine and that crowd, that there are levels of Biblical meaning. There is a literal meaning, a moral meaning, a typological meaning and a mystical meaning among others. When something can’t be read literally, perhaps it makes more sense as an analogy.

How I can tell what is literal history and what is a parable? 

Well, that is why God gave us a pope and a sacred tradition of interpretation stretching all the way back to the apostles.

So what do we believe about creation? 

St. Justin Martyr (155 AD) reminds us that Psalm 90, verse 4 says that for the Lord a thousand years are like one day. God is eternal, beyond time, not limited by the rules and categories that hem you and me in. 

We old geezers often use phrases like, “In my day.....” (I love it when a seventeen year old says "Back in the day...." What day are they talking about? Yesterday?) The geezers and the children don’t literally mean a day. We mean an era and we go on and on and on about it, proving that it must have been a very long era.

We Catholics believe that the first chapters of Genesis are indeed history, but not history in the modern style. There is much allegory that make the historical points, among others that God made all things out of nothing and that man and woman are his special and unique creation, different from all the rest, though not unrelated to it. 

My own view of the seven days is that seven is a Hebrew number that always reminds us of God’s covenant. Seven in Hebrew is essentially the same word as “to swear.” From God’s point of view, the world was made in seven epochs, reminding us that creation itself is a sign of God’s covenant of love with humanity. But that’s just my idea.

So, you are free to believe that God made the world in seven periods of 24 hours in October of 4004 BC, or you are free to believe that He did it in His own good time and His own way. The Lord doesn't tell us the world’s age in the Bible because the exact date isn't necessary for our salvation and unlike me, Bishop Usher and most religious commentators, the Almighty does not waste words. 

Yours,

Rev. Know-It-All
 

PS.  If you opt for the October 4004 BC date, throw a party. And be sure to let me know what’s on the menu.